Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns was born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, USA, and raised in South Carolina. He briefly attended the University of South Carolina at Columbia, before moving to New York in late 1948, where he attended the Parsons School of Design for a semester.

In 1953, after completing two years military service, he settled in New York where he met and became friends with the artist Robert Rauschenberg, composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. He made his first Flag, Target and Number paintings in 1954 and 1955. In 1958 he had his first one-man exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, which won him immediate recognition. Johns’ concern for and interest in process led him to printmaking. Since 1960 he has made over 300 prints, his innovations in screenprinting, lithography, and etching revolutionising the field. He is regarded as one the greatest living printmakers.

The subject of countless solo exhibitions worldwide, most recently at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2017), which toured to The Broad, Los Angeles (2018), Johns work is also housed in major collections including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Kunstmuseum Basel; National Museum of Stockholm, Sweden; Städtische Galerie, Frankfurt; British Museum, London and Tate, London.